Step 2: Click on PowerPivot and it will navigate to PowerPivot Management Dashboard.

Step 3: If your PowerPivot has some issues then you can find the below error in PowerPivot Management Dashboard.

Also you might noticed, at the bottom of the page there’s Workbook Activity. It’s a simple one, we have to install Microsoft Silverlight on the server and if you already have Silverlight running then you won’t get this. This Silverlight installation needs to be done in client machine as well.

Step 4: The problem here is because of permissions thing. This PowerPivot Management Dashboard is in our SharePoint server and inside Central Administration. Remember, central admin has its own database. So, the problem is that our App Pool account doesn’t have role membership to this database.

Go to SQL server -> Open SQL Server Management Studio and select that database (SharePoint Central Admin) and select the App pool account then right click and select Properties.

Step 5: In Properties window go to Membership and check on SPDataAccess then click on OK.

Step 6: Now switch back to SharePoint server and go to PowerPivot Management Dashboard and you won’t find that error which appeared earlier. PowerPivot is working fine now and there’s no PowerPivot workbook so it is blank. The rest of the operations, I am leaving to the readers to go ahead and create a PowerPivot workbook for testing.

I hope this would be helpful to address the not so user-friendly error thrown by PowerPivot. Thank you for reading.

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